Interview: Billy Duffy - Captain Riffs

Billy Duffy is upset at his
team. No, not his fellow
players in The Cult—the
now-legendary British band he
founded in the early ’80s with
singer Ian Astbury, a band who,
despite their early androgynous
image, flew the flag for heavy
man-rock throughout a decade
better known for twee synth
bands. No, all’s good in the
Cult camp, thank you—indeed,
their new album, the Bob Rock produced
Choice of Weapon, is
a strikingly rich return to form,
arguably deeper lyrically and
broader stylistically than 2001’s
Beyond Good and Evil or 2007’s
Born Into This.

Nope, the problem is with
Duffy’s other team, his beloved
hometown Manchester City football
club (that’s “soccer team” to
us Yanks), who, after a dominant
first stage of the Barclay’s English
Premier League season—when
they looked sure bets to clinch the
title—have suddenly fallen behind
their local arch rivals, Manchester
United. “We should have at least
won the Carling Cup Semi-
Final,” Duffy grouses. Duffy’s
devotion to his team (often
simply called “Man City”) even
extends to his Dunlop Herco Flex
50 medium-gauge guitar picks:
Store-bought versions are gold
hued, but Dunlop makes Duffy’s
in Manchester City blue.

In soccer terms, Duffy’s role
in Team Cult might be seen as
that of a creative midfielder—he
originates virtually all of the
band’s meaty, majestic riffs,
supplying spot-on harmonic
opportunities for singer Astbury
to finish off with his rich,
full-bodied baritone runs and
gutsy lyrical moves. Drummer
John Tempesta (formerly of
Testament) and bassist Chris
Wyse round out the band’s
formidable back line, working
from the engine room to
lay down a solid, technically
adept foundation for Duffy
and Astbury’s mazey musical
dialogue. (On tour, Mike
Dimkich accompanies the band
on rhythm guitar—call him a
“super-sub”!)

As with the most distinctive
footballers, you can recognize
Duffy’s style immediately. “She
Sells Sanctuary” (from 1985’s
Love)—perhaps his signature
song—is built around a descending
Mixolydian figure on the
G string, played as a continuous
double-stop with a droning
open D string. It’s an approach
Duffy initially used to fatten
his sound within the context of
a power trio, and it has made
its mark on tunes throughout
the band’s career. On Choice of
Weapon, it turns up on “The
Wolf,” “Amnesia,” and others.
Still, Duffy’s equally at home
with slash chords that recall the
MC5 and the Stooges, while his
parked-wah solo flights in songs
like the classic “Fire Woman”
recall Mick Ronson and Angus
Young, two of his formative
idols. Duffy’s other trademark—
besides his impressive coifs—are
the Gretsch White Falcons and
Gibson Les Paul Customs he’s
been using to deliver his kicks
for some 30 years now.

Your classic-rock rhythms and
single-note, Ennio Morricone-ish
stylings are always great,
but you’re probably best known
for those droning D-string
pedal tones, like on “She Sells
Sanctuary” and “Rain.” Where
does that come from?
If you go back to the song
“Horse Nation,” from 1983 or
’84, that droning lick is already
my thing, and then, yeah, it got
typified by “She Sells Sanctuary.”
What’s interesting is that you
could play those notes in several
places on the neck, obviously,
and you could even pick them
all out of a standard D chord
shape. But I got into this habit
because there was only one
guitar player in the band, and
it just helped filled the sound
out. I also started adding a little
echo, which filled the sound
out even more, but partly gets
eaten up by the band, so it’s not
so obvious. If you heard it on
it’s own, you’d probably think
the guitar was a bit too echoy
and busy, and you’d think,
“Oh, that’s a bit odd.” But once
you’ve got bass and vocals and
tom-tom-heavy drums, a lot of
that echo would kind of vanish,
and the guitar simply gets
“placed” in a nice way.

That drone style is sort of
similar to what Peter Hook
was doing on bass at the same
time in Joy Division—another
Manchester band.
Sure, that’s all in the DNA of
The Cult. It’s all part of where
we came from. See, back in
the late ’70s, we were all into
the New York Dolls and Iggy
& The Stooges, the MC5, and
Bowie, and then punk happened
and we all sort of moved
towards that. But after punk,
bands like us wanted to find
our own voice. How do you follow
that? I didn’t want to have a
safety pin through my nose and
a stupid mohawk. So, you’re
not reaching for Les Pauls and
Marshall amps anymore—you’re
looking for something different,
which is how I arrived at the
sort of spaghetti-Western sound
and the Gretsch guitars. There’s
a song called “The Hop” from
my pre-Cult band, Theater of
Hate—which is still a great
band today—that people can
find that’s really the first song I
played on that way. That band
had a saxophone player who
electronically treated his sax,
so it sounded more like Roxy
Music. The drums were very
tribal. After all, it was postpunk,
so the drums were very
tom-tom oriented. They weren’t
straight rock beats. The bass
used to do a lot of riffs, kind
of like, yeah, Joy Division. So I
had to find some way to make
my guitar fit into that.

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